What if you attack the power grid? like taking out major power plants? how would you datacenters and server even work when this happenes?

I would think that many of them have backup diesel generators. The science building I work in has them. If the power goes out we don't even know it. We just hear the diesel engines fire up and see the exhaust smoke coming out of them from the far side of the parking lot.

Now data is entirely frozen. Nothing can get anywhere, because all the roads, bridges, and traffic lights are in ruin. All that's left of the Internet is your office intranet, or the file-swapping in your dorm. The tiny shreds. There are nets, but none of them are inter.
But remember, to do this, you would've just completed the single most complex, sweeping act of destruction in human history. But with anything less, the Internet would still be kicking.
And that's what makes it so impossibly damn strong. Nobody will ever be able to pull off thousands of attacks around the entire planet at once, with one coordinated blast and chop. Unless you had a team of tens of thousands to strike everywhere at the exact same time, repairs would outpace destruction—this isn't a job for a lone wolf. Short of a thermonuclear apocalypse—which would lead to some bigger problems than Facebook downtime—we just can't damage so much stuff spread so widely. We just built it too well.

so I guess Chinese government should be a good candidate.

or American government

Quote:

Originally Posted by BinaryDemon

Honestly it would be slower than fiber, but I would think just for additional redundancy more satallite links need to be thrown into the mix.

no one really unless you heavily invested in to the mail or phoning business...Edited by darksideleader - 5/24/12 at 5:34pm

internet, extremely resilient to destruction perhaps, due to too many people/organizations wanting it up
but, it can be very easily widely censored, due to governing bodies having far too much control.
good thing they only bother with dns

Impossible to do. The internet comes from the military information network (when you hear quotes saying Al Gore "invented the internet" it's because he responded to a question about the internet's creation by talking about the bill he sponsored which brought that exact technology to the public, in effect creating the internet) which was specifically invented as a way for military instalations and units to continue comunicating after a nuclear attack. In effect the internet, or the code behind it, is a way to direct information, or a way for information to navigate. Physically speaking you can cut (or blow up through nuclear bombs) any connection in the network and the information is almost instantaneously rerouted. The predecessor of the internet was designed to survive nuclear war... and the internet isn't any different. So yeah, impossible.